All posts tagged Amazon

Amazon.com turned in its worst year on the market since 2008, taking a big bite out of founder Jeff Bezos’ personal net worth.

Chief Executive Bezos saw his Amazon holdings lose about $7.4 billion in value over the course of the year as the e-commerce giant’s shares fell more than 22%. Still, Bezos’ 84 million shares, equal to 18.3% of the company, will ring in the New Year with a value of roughly $26.1 billion. Read More »

Major technology companies in 2014 publicly released data that shed light on the racial and gender make-up of their employees. These “diversity reports” substantiated criticism that Silicon Valley workforces are predominantly white and male, particularly in the upper ranks.

Click the graphic or here to compare companies by their percentages of women and minorities in tech and leadership. Read More »

Amazon.com said customers bought enough Elsa dolls from the Walt Disney movie “Frozen” this holiday season to reach the top of Cinderella’s castle 855 times.

The online retailer revealed that fact in its annual press release following Christmas that reviews the website’s recent holiday season. The release doesn’t offer much insight into Amazon’s actual sales or profits, and it’s usually a way for the retailer to brag about how much it has sold or delivered. Nonetheless, it does offer some details on the season’s more popular gifts. Read More »

Google hasn’t promoted this feature of YouTube aggressively. For instance, there’s no link on YouTube’s home page pointing to the movie channel. YouTube makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Read More »

Among the television nominees for the 72nd Golden Globe Awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association again proved its penchant for the hot, new thing–including a first-year series led by 70-year-old Jeffrey Tambor.

For his role in “Transparent,” the Hollywood veteran was nominated for best actor in a comedy series, his first Golden Globe nomination. The Amazon Studios series, about a transgender father of three, was also nominated for best comedy, marking the first major award nomination for the streaming service.

That sets up a direct battle between television’s new guard: Amazon will go head-to-head in the comedy category against Netflix, which was nominated for its prison ensemble “Orange Is the New Black.” Last year, “Orange” competed as a drama. Read More »

The takeover will help Twitch bring in new advertisers and sponsors of professional game players, some of whom make more than $1 million a year playing popular titles like “World of Warcraft” and “Minecraft.”

Amazon bought San Francisco-based Twitch for about $1 billion in September. Twitch has a network of about 60 million active viewers monthly who log on to see 1.1 million broadcasters, as the players are known. Read More »

Amazon.com on Tuesday introduced a new feature on its site allowing customers to bid below an item’s initial price, an attempt to boost sales for collectibles, art and other one-of-a-kind items.

The new option, known as “Make an Offer,” allows sellers to accept or reject bids on items like a currently-listed $449 Seattle Seahawks jersey signed by quarterback Russell Wilson. The new option could help sellers move items that they didn’t price competitively, for instance.

Sellers have three days to respond to bids, which are made privately, and can make counteroffers, according to an Amazon statement Tuesday. The company says about 150,000 items are eligible under “Make an Offer” including fine art, sports collectibles and coins, representing a small fraction of the millions of goods it sells on its site today. Read More »

Amazon is slashing the price of its Fire phone by $250, offering an unlocked version of the device for $199, mirroring a typical starter price for competitors’ higher-end phones that are locked into two-year service contracts with wireless carriers. Read More »

The head of Amazon.com’s Web-services division says he’s not threatened by large cash hoards at cloud-computing rivals Google and Microsoft.

“I don’t view that as a differentiator,” Andy Jassy said Wednesday at the annual Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas. “We are highly confident inside of Amazon that we’ll be able to fund this business to its potential.”

As he has before, Jassy said he expects Web services to one day surpass Amazon’s traditional retail business in revenue, though he said he doesn’t know when that would happen. Analysts estimate that AWS generates more than $4 billion per year in sales, though Amazon doesn’t disclose the figure, compared with about $70 billion for the retail unit. Read More »